Between Us

So many questions are poorly posed because we fail to think relationally. Yeah, yeah, I know that over the years us new realists (largely between OOO theorists and Whiteheadians) have had vicious and heated debates. “Gasp! Is Levi now doing an about face and saying things are relational after all?!?” No. In my view, those debates failed to understand the issue. The question was never whether or not there are relations, nor whether or not relations are important. No, the question was whether or not entities can be reduced to their relations. OOO theorists such as myself argued– for a variety of epistemological, ontological, political, and ethical reasons –that entities can be severed from their relations and enter into new relations. In other words, OOO argues that entities enjoy some minimal autonomy and independence from the relations to other entities they currently enjoy. Whiteheadians, by contrast, argue that entities are their relations, such that there is no being of an entity in excess of its relations to other entities. By analogy, you could say that one side was composed of Deleuzians who hold that relations are external to their terms (entities), such that they can shift, change, and be severed, while on the other side you have the Right Hegelians who hold that all relations are internal such that there is no being of beings in excess of that totality of relations. Externalism versus internalism. That was the issue.

I have no wish to rehearse that tiring debate– which at points came to resemble theological meditations on just how many angels can fit on the head of a pin –but rather to point out that within the OOO framework, relations are a key issue. Indeed, from one vantage, I would say that my central question is “what is the relation between relations and relata (entities)?” What obsesses me is not objects, but ecologies. To think ecologically is to think relationally. However, I believe that if you are to understand ecologies you have to begin from the premise that entities are external to their relations, such that sometimes they are subtracted from an ecology, sometimes they are added to an ecology, and something the relations between entities in an ecology change. All of these cases lead to substantial changes in the ecology. In the world of nature, these changes wrought by entities being added or subtracted from a particular ecosystem are what ecologists study. Ecological practice— not to be confused with the self-reflexive moment of how ecology superficially theorizes or represents what it is doing –is incredibly sensitive to the fragility of ecosystems and the contingency of relations. Their practice is much more interesting than their theory.

read on!

Okay, so the debate between agency and structure. You get a failure to think relationally when you go on and on about agents, as if they were little sovereigns that exist in a vacuum or void, unrelated to anything else. There is both a left and a right version of this in the political sphere. The right version, of course, consists in the thesis that there are only individuals and that society can be reduced to individuals. Margaret Thatcher: “society doesn’t exist, there are only individuals and families”. This allows Thatcher and other conservatives to conveniently ignore anything like material conditions or social forces, pretending that we’re all self-made men that pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps. The conservative can then morally condemn, for example, the poor person, he can treat the poor person as suffering from a moral failing and lack of will because, gosh darn it, he just didn’t try. “La la la! Sociological or material conditions had nothing to do with it! No ecology here folks, move along, move along!” Leftwing agentism and non-relationism is identical. Where the rightwinger wants to morally condemn the poor person and minorities, the liberal (the sad excuse for leftism in the United States) wants to morally condemn businesses and politicians. Like the conservative, the execrable liberal forgets ecology. In his superficial mind, politicians and businesses act in a vacuum. Consequently, if they do horrible things, the lame liberal says, then this is because they’re morally horrible people– they’re “greedy” for example — who are just psychopaths. While it’s true that there are many morally horrible capitalists and politicians, the problem with this whole theory is that it forgets that businesses and politicians too act within an ecology or in relation to other things and the decisions aren’t entirely up to them.

I’ll, of course, take the lame, weenie liberal over the conservative any day, but the problem with them is that they seem to think that if we just scolded capitalists and politicians enough and morally edified them, they’d change their wicked ways. In other words, they fail to recognize that it is the anonymous system, the ecology, that’s the issue, not so much the individuals. If there’s a splendor to game theory– and believe me, that splendor does reside in its idiotic theory of human nature and motives (maximizing self-interest) –then it lies in the fact that game theory conceives deliberation or reasoning as a dyadic relation between an agent and another agent, not something that resides in an isolated agent apart from everything else in the world. In other words, game theory implicitly says that decisions do not arise from agents simpliciter, but from the network as a whole (i.e., the results are “anonymous”). Lacan understood this as well in his discourse theory. The core of Lacanian discourse theory lies in the thesis that a discourse is a dyadicrelation between a speaker and an addressee, not something that’s defined by a “subject-matter” like biology. Thus, for example, when Lacan says the discourse of the hysteric is the only discourse that produces knowledge, he’s not saying that only hysterics produce knowledge. Rather, he’s saying that in the hysterics relation to another, s/he provokes that other in such a way that he begins talking and generates knowledge. It is the relation between the two that produces the knowledge– the challenge to established bodies of knowledge –not a subject in isolation gazing on the world. Ecology.

The point here isn’t that agency doesn’t exist. That’d be stupid. The point is that agents exercise their agency in a world or an ecology, and within that world sometimes it’s impossible to make a move at all and sometimes the only moves are bad moves. Chess is a good example. Sometimes your pawn is pinned down in such a way that it can’t move forward at all. Tough luck. At other times you find yourself in a situation where your only real choice is to sacrifice your rook to save your king. Tough luck. Rooks and pawns are agents, they have choices, but those choices are constrained by the broader relations they entertain to other pieces on the board. Those relations are, of course, perpetually change so there are fluctuations in the material possibility space of any piece’s agency at any given point in time. This is what it means to talk about “social forces”. Social forces aren’t some enigmatic, magical, and mysterious thing as Latour polemically likes to suggest. Rather, social forces are constraints on agency that don’t emerge from any particular agent, but from the ecology of agents at a particular point in time. Failure to understand this entails a failure to understand why agents make such “horrible” decisions and to fall back on a moral stance that they’re either just lazy or greedy. Failure to understand that ecology, in its turn, leads to piss poor political strategy because one believes a scolding is sufficient to change things (individualist or agentist thinking), rather than understanding that it’s the network of anonymous ecological relations that more or less necessitates the decision. While it might be hard for some to bear, the banker on Wall Street is no less making decisions in an ecology of bankers that exceed him, than all of us other dopes. He does what he does not so much because he’s a greedy bastard– though there are plenty of those –but because if he doesn’t the other banker will and his bank will either go under or he’ll lose his job. Like the decision to sacrifice your rook to save your king, the banker makes the bad decision to save his skin. The question then is one of how to effectively intervene in that ecology to disrupt the network of tendencies that lead to this exploitation, instability, and oppression.

‘that entities can be severed from their relations and enter into new relations’

Is the sphere of possibilities of a chess knight prefigured by the understanding that we play chess? Whereas the knight is a chess knight, and not a block of wood, it seems to exist only as a chess knight among other chess pieces. If it makes some stupid decisions, and does so as a chess knight, this seems already prefigured by whoever is understanding this as a chess game–confined by the laws of chess–and not a game of pick-up sticks.

If someone thinks there is a politics and also a right and a left then this is likewise prefigured in a similar way. Any possible “intervention” would affect a group of presupposed agents.

This ability to make a few choices, if that is what is in question, seems like a pseudo autonomy, something closer to the opposite of independence. This entity is never ‘severed from its relations’ since it remains always bound by chess, it never becomes, for example, a flying piece of wood pushed off the table by a growling chess player. That would be a new sphere of relations!

It’s an analogy, and as is the case with all analogies, it’s imperfect. It’s important not to focus on the understanding of the game held by the players, but to pretend that the chess pieces are agents themselves. The thing to get is that they find themselves in a constrained space that transcends them. For me, it’s really important to avoid the urge to go back to a subject or mind that imposes the rules. That philosophical move, while being relevant in some cases, has generated all sorts of mischief and made us blind to material conditions.

What kind of laws are you talking about? At anybrate, laws are constraints and actors among others. In human ecosystems, for example, there are semiotic actors like laws, material beings like mountains, roads, viruses, etc, and intelligent entities like people, corporations, governments, universities, etc.

I was thinking in the context the hubbub around the CEO testimony before Congress last week where Apple says we will do exactly what the law requires nothing more (in reference to taxes) as well as the need for simplified tax law.

As Jon Stewart retorted, the reason the laws were so complicated was because of the lobbying of big corporations. So it’s probably a bad use of your analogy, but if a rook could influence the laws which govern their movement, they could act in idiosyncratic manner, perhaps unbeknownst to the rest of the players on the board.

I have been trying to work with democracy of objects to develop an exchange about the status of corporations as actors in the international political economy, where we treat them as ‘powerful’ objects. Since the ‘value’ of a corporation is based on expected future earnings, share price is always a material analogy of relations, but not determined by them exclusively. In any case, law is often an integral part to the character of incorporation (such as in the Glass–Steagall act), as well as in the determination of share price through lobbying and compliance. I was just curious because the monetarist assault on central banks in the 1980’s was interested in wresting the power of law-making away from ‘disinterested’ actors into ones that pursued their own goals. In other words, changing the rules of the chessboard for their own advantage.

To me, you sound like you’ve taken good old fashioned Kantian free-will into your purview. Is this what is meant by objects being severed from fixed (existing and so anthropocentric) relations?: That they have some choice-power that goes outside physics, i.e., the laws we proscribe to ourselves (as an Absolute truth all must obey) on a Kantian view?

Are you able to give expression to any of this without metaphor? In a way that we can test it in our experience and so agree or disagree through sheer everyday understanding.

“For me, it’s really important to avoid the urge to go back to a subject or mind that imposes the rules.”

You’re, it seems, talking about an anthropocentric world (one of our rules, our limits, which is not to say consciously proscribed), the world we (not necessarily as egos), with whatever scare quotes you please, find ourselves able to discuss and live in, the only one we can ever encounter, in which there is an element of transcendence and so autonomy (posited as a speculation), i.e., the special choice power of the objects. This seems like sheer old fashioned Kantianism.

I don’t follow and am not sure how you’re getting that out of anything I’ve said. My target is anthropocentrism and our tendency to restrict our analysis to how humans encounter other things in terms of meaning, language, and the phenomenological structure of our experience. Being both a naturalist and a materialist, I certainly wouldn’t be interested in claims that flatly deny the laws of physics. Recognizing that there are complex systems with their own dynamics above those of human will and intention does not amount to somehow denying the laws of physics. You seem to have overlooked words analogy, pretend, imperfect, etc, in my response to you.

I didn’t overlook any of that and that is why I wrote: “Are you able to give expression to any of this without metaphor?”

I think you speak of choice. Can that be an analogy, if so for what? I presume it is not an analogy. Of course we can assume you mean ‘choice’, but that doesn’t change the Kant connection.

Kant embraced, not denied, the laws of nature as eternal truths, he just thought there was something there exceeding our grasp (because we are in finitude) and since most of what the (science thought as) fundamental science, physics, deals with, has no material form, this seems corroborated down to our own day. Parenthetically, Nietzsche later challenged this. The point in Kant is that in the world of our everyday concerns we don’t encounter the laws of nature, it’s in our representation of absolute truth, i.e., physics, that we read about things like gravity & causal relations & time, things that don’t exist properly, can not be materially isolated. We, of course, derivatively, get some technology and so on from our access to these absolute truths.

I was supposing a familiarity with object-oriented ontology as expressed on the wiki page & by Harman.

“Specifically, object-oriented ontology opposes the anthropocentrism of Immanuel Kant’s Copernican Revolution, whereby objects are said to conform to the mind of the subject and, in turn, become products of human cognition.”

If your both naturalist and materialist how can you do phenomenology? Phenomenology specifically avoids the assertion of absolute truth claims.

Kant basically understood Newtonian physics (but it goes for other physics too, potentially) as prescribing for man the fundamental laws of nature, i.e., what he understood as the true or absolute world (as opposed to the everyday world of our concerns, i.e., presence or existence). However, it is possible to understand freedom in Kant, i.e. freedom as positive freedom (not ‘freedom from’ [nature]), as going beyond this and leading to a from of behavior that is not a function of causal chains nor contained in the absolute truth (as given in the fundamental science of physics) of the sciences.

Perhaps Harman is saying that the objects, since they are not ego-consciousness agents have some x property, similar to choice, but left uncharacterized? It seems like a collateral free-will discussion, but I haven’t found were anyone addresses the subject. We just get the vague statement that there must be something “more” than the relations.

You see why I then ask, is this something “more” basically a crypto free-will? I wish someone would point out to me where he explains his relation to the Being and Time view that the world is basically product of Dasien’s use and needs. It’s hard to see why his objects are understood as autonomous or independent of us and the ontic of a metaphysics.

You seem to have confused me with Graham Harman. His blog is elsewhere. You’re welcome to consult my book, The Democracy of Objects which is available for free online. That will acquaint you with my positions on Kant. If you’re interested in my views on phenomenology and how I integrate it in a limited way, you can use the search function on this blog and search “borromean critical theory”, “second order observation”, or “alien phenomenology” or await my next book, Onto-Cartography. As far as Kant is concerned, I think his first critique is a now defunct philosophical position that is only of historical interest today. Just as we don’t spend our time engaging with the intricacies of astrology, there’s little point in addressing philosophical questions in Kant’s terms.

And to be clear, I don’t think all entities have choice and agency. Certainly rocks and stars don’t. I believe choice and agency are restricted to living beings like animals, persons, corporations, and so on. The post your remarks are responding to were making no grand claims about FREE WILL (to my knowledge, no one h as solved that issue in a satisfactory way without resorting to magic or ad hoc nonsense like Kant). I was merely making the claim that action is constrained by its environment and attempting to show how that works. No weird metaphysics needs to be adopted to make that point.

I should clarify my remarks on Kant to avoid confusion. First, I think he’s untenable because we’ve reached a point with neurology and cognitive science that’s more or less shown that his model of mind is just profoundly inaccurate. Second, we’re also at a point where investigation of mind can no longer be done from the armchair by philosophers. Again, neurology and cog sci have undermined all this. Third, and in a vein most relevant to your remarks, Kant just doesn’t give us a solution to the problem of free will. As I’ve argued in a number of posts (cf., “Axioms for a Dark Ontology, for example), it is my view that naturalism is the only credible meta-ontological position today. Now what does Kant tell us about free will in the third antinomy? He says, “okay at the level of how we experience the world, everything is determined; but you see there’s this other world, the noumenal world, where there’s freedom!” That’s not a solution, it’s an assertion. Moreover, it’s a particularly problematic assertion because it suggests the existence of some other world that isn’t the natural world. I find this unacceptable. It’s really no different than someone saying “we have free will because God!” This is why I characterize it as “magic”. Any account of free will has to be, in my view, articulated within a naturalistic and neurological framework. It has to show how a causal system becomes capable of self-determination. So far no one has provided such an account, so we muddle along working on the supposition that we have free will, while holding open the possibility that we might find out that Spinoza was right all along and there is no free will. So it goes. Some problems are intractable like that.

More to the point, you and I are talking about freedom in entirely different senses. You’re talking about free will. I’m not talking about about that at all. I’m talking about constrained and unconstrained behavior. If, for example, someone ties me to a chair, I’m constrained and can’t act in the way that I normally would. We need not get into any obscure discussion about the metaphysics of free will to talk about freedom and constraint in this sense. Nor need we introduce any sort of weird extra-natural forms of causality into our picture to talk about freedom and constraint in these terms. All I was saying in my initial response to you about chess was that your questions about players understanding the rules of the game misses the point of the analogy. I wasn’t attributing any sort of weird agency to chess pieces. I was just saying that there are points in the game where there are no good moves for the piece and that this is how it is in life too. The people playing the game just aren’t relevant to the analogy here. If you don’t like that analogy, choose another.

Regarding your point about phenomenology, of course I don’t accept everything about phenomenology. Nonetheless, I take it as rather obvious that human beings, bats, tigers, dogs, corporations, and a variety of critters besides experience the world and that we can can describe the structure of that experience and try to learn a thing or two about how nonhumans experience the world (what Jakob von Uexkull calls “animal ethology”). Why you feel that this somehow contradictions naturalism is perplexing to me. The naturalist doesn’t have to reject the notion that beings experience the world; though he might very well- as I do –question whether or not that experience is reflective of what’s really going on (I’ve written a lot about neurology lately discussing this, you can consult those posts if you want). Phenomenology, I think, is a valuable technique for describing experience, but does, I think, suffer from thinking that it gives incorrigible insight into why our minds work as I do. Again, you can find out why I think this by looking at my posts on the significance of neurology.

Finally, regarding the term “OOO”, you seem to think that I somehow am a disciple of Graham Harman or share his positions. While I’ve certainly been influenced by him in a variety of ways, our positions are quite different (for starters, he rejects materialism and naturalism, whereas I embrace them. Our conception of objects are quite different as well, and I don’t advocate a theory of withdrawal or relations that resembles his). I coined the term “OOO” precisely because these differences exist. Harman calls his position “object-oriented philosophy” and makes a specific set of claims. Others such as myself or Jane Bennett make quite different claims. We need a term that would capture a broad family resemblance among these philosophies (that they’re all committed to the thesis that being is composed of things or units) but that would underline that they are different from one another. This is what “OOO” signifies. It’s a term like “rationalism” or “empiricism”– where rationalists differ amongst themselves as in the case of the debate between Spinoza and Leibniz –not the name of a specific philosophy like say Whitehead’s philosophy. OOO is not Harman, but rather OOP is Harman. Likewise, my positions are not Harman’s. He’s not guilty of my claims, nor am I guilty of his. I say all this to emphasize that you need to take care in attributing claims to others made by entirely different philosophers. If you’re interested in Harman’s views on these issues, you should strike up an email exchange with him, not address these things to me based on a wikipedia entry.

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It is your reading of him that I querry, due to its relevance to the question about going over-and-above the sphere of fixed relations. Certainly i take as a matter of course that you do not speak for someone else from the start.

‘no grand claims about FREE WILL’

I didn’t suppose you were making any ‘grand’ claims to free will. It is more that the problem seems to suggest the same very dark ground of an unanswered gap in the system of relations. Only because you assert Nature, rather than God, does the x factor, free will, seem to take on some other characteristic (than that of a free will).

“ Kant just doesn’t give us a solution to the problem of free will” Yes, this is what I think, too. But this is his merit, and is much like a phenomenological move. Perhaps we go further into scientific skepticism by speaking of the non-causal x here (i.e, avoiding determined causality/random causality). This is the case in physics anyway, concerning the unpredictability of the squared component of the spin of a particle in a given direction, so that the behavior of the particle can not be a function of the past.

Finally, regarding the term “OOO”, you seem to think that I somehow am a disciple of Graham Harman or share his positions. The reason I pushed his name was not because I thought you had some major connections to him but because of his concern with the point about the difference between what you typified as a Whiteheadian view and the view where there is something over-and-above ,somehow, a plane of fixed relations.

Harman says Ray Brassier is likewise encountering some turbulence around this issue and so introducing odd concepts to account for the difficulty. Maybe you are familiar with his comments on this. I’m not sure what the problem even is, that’s why I ask for an example rather than a metaphor.

I wonder if Georg Simmel’s example, presented in the form of a simile, is close to the problem. If the world were simply casual, with no addition, it would be complete before it started. How would time slip in?

‘In this regard we are all like chess players. If [we] did not know, to a certain extent what the consequences of a certain move would be, the game would be impossible; but, it would also be impossible if the foresight extended indefinitely.’ Georg Simmel

I think this is an example because it is literally true of a chess game, that it could not be played, but rather only played out as demonstration of a complete game, if all consequences of all moves were known in advance. Although, of course, Simmel does not present it this way.

“Why you feel that this somehow contradictions naturalism is perplexing to me.”

I can see the methodology can be made to serve a naturalist project, but perhaps in the mode of a self-deception. Why are humans immune to our own limitations? Why do we have the ultimate position at our disposal? It sounds anthropomorphic. It seems unscientific if science means skepticism in the face of what is not demonstrated.

“Moreover, it’s a particularly problematic assertion because it suggests the existence of some other world that isn’t the natural world. I find this unacceptable.”

I suppose you mean to exclude subjectivity as the site of causality or anything else. Do you understand naturalism as involving representation in the brain, of something like a sense data-packet? With the resultant: our life of daily concerns is lived in the representation (thought as absolutely reliable duplicate of natural truth).

I think you thorougly misunderstand what I’m saying. I’m saying the only acceptable account of free will is within a naturalistic and scientific context. We may find there is no free will. I’m not asserting or defending some mysterious set of things outside of or beyond nature.

With apologies, I have no idea what you’re asking for, nor what it has to do with anything I’ve written. If you’d like to know more about my views on naturalism, you’re welcome to use the search function in the right hand column of your screen. I think this is a good time to part ways in this discussion as we seem not to be understanding one another and you keep attributing positions and claims to me that I’m not making. Best of luck in your philosophical explorations.

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